Franz Kafka Quotes

220 Sourced Quotes

In me, by myself, without human relationship, there are no visible lies. The limited circle is pure.

Franz Kafka
To write prescriptions is easy, but to come to an understanding with people is hard.

Franz Kafka
I won't give up the diary again. I must hold on here, it is the only place I can.

Franz Kafka
This morning, for the first time in a long time, the joy again of imagining a knife twisted in my heart.

Franz Kafka
My job is unbearable to me because it conflicts with my only desire and my only calling, which is literature. Since I am nothing but literature and can and want to be nothing else, my job will never take possession of me, it may, however, shatter me completely, and this is by no means a remote possibility.

Franz Kafka
I'm thinking only of my illness and my health, though both, the first as well as the second, are you.

Franz Kafka
If something good has lost its way into you, it will make its escape overnight. I know you.

Franz Kafka
It requires enormous presence of mind or rather quickness of wit, when opening your eyes to seize hold as it were of everything in the room at exactly the same place where you had let it go on the previous evening. That is why the moment of waking up was the riskiest moment of the day. Once that was well over without deflecting you from your orbit, you could take heart of grace for the rest of the day.

Franz Kafka
The old incapacity. Interrupted my writing for barely ten days and already cast out. Once again prodigious efforts stand before me. You have to dive down, as it were, and sink more rapidly than that which sinks in advance of you.

Franz Kafka
Time is short, my strength is limited, the office is a horror, the apartment is noisy, and if a pleasant, straightforward life is not possible, then one must try to wriggle through by subtle manoeuvres.

Franz Kafka